Some potential mentors are listed by each project; this is far from a normative list, but it might give you somebody to ask about the project.

Note: Contacting the mentors privately (e.g., via e-mail or private IRC messages) will get you off to a very, very bad start in your relations with us and any application you send us is now almost definitely going to not get accepted.

About proposals

Before you dive in and send a proposal to us through Google, it's a good idea to take some time and learn about the MusicBrainz community. At MusicBrainz we pride ourselves for having a strong community - most of us know each other in some way, and some of us know each other face to face from development summits.

A good way to get a feel of this would be to talk about your ideas and proposals on IRC. However, starting off by sending private messages to potential mentors is not a good way to introduce yourself to the community. Please don't do that!

Join in on development

We like it when potential students show initiative and make contributions to code without asking us what to do next. We have tagged tickets that we think are suitable for for new contributors with the "good-first-bug" label. Take a look at these tickets and see if any of them grab your interest. If a ticket is not assigned to anyone you can assume that it's up for grabs - feel free to assign yourself and start working on it. We recommend that you also talk to us before starting work on a ticket, to make sure that you understand what tasks are involved to finish the ticket. We recommend that you explain to us your understanding of the ticket - we will help you if there is anything that you have missed. To talk to us, join our IRC channel or post a message in the forums or on a ticket.

Projects

AcousticBrainz crowdsources acoustic information for all music in the world and to make it available to the public. We already have low-level information for over 10 million tracks. What we need is a good way for users and developers to interact with all this data and help improve algorithms that are used to analyze it.

It would suit someone with experience or an interest in machine learning algorithms, though the majority of the project will probably involve creating infrastructure around our existing algorithms.

We're interested in projects that help us reach our roadmap, and that add major functionalities to the website.

The three suggested ideas to build proposals around are replacement of the search engine, a user collection feature and a unified creation form.
Please see our ideas page for more details and information on getting started.

MusicBrainz Picard is a cross-platform (Linux/Mac OS X/Windows) application written in Python and is the official MusicBrainz tagger. It supports the majority of audio file formats, is capable of using audio fingerprints (AcoustIDs), performing CD lookups and disc ID submissions, and it has excellent Unicode support.